If I have a mission upon this earth, (apart from the patent and notable
one of being a frightful example to the rising generation of blighted
existence and misused energies)--that mission is, I believe, beef.
I am a Cœlebs, not in search of a wife, as in Mrs. Hannah More’s
white-neck-clothed novel, but in search of beef. I have travelled far
and wide to find it--good, tender, nourishing, juicy, succulent; and
when I die, I hope that it will be inscribed on my tombstone: “Here
lies one who sought for beef. Tread lightly on his grave: quia multum
amavit.”
Next to the Habeas Corpus and the Freedom of the Press, there are
few things that the English people have a greater respect for and a
livelier faith in than beef. They bear, year after year, with the same
interminable unvarying series of woodcuts of fat oxen in the columns
of the illustrated newspapers; they are never tired of crowding to
the Smithfield Club cattle-show; and I am inclined to think that it
is their honest reverence for beef that has induced them to support
so long the obstruction and endangerment of the thoroughfares of the
metropolis, by oxen driven to slaughter. Beef is a great connecting
link and bond of better feeling between the great classes of the
commonwealth. Do not dukes hob and nob with top-booted farmers over
the respective merits of short-horns and Alderneys? Does not the noble
Marquis of Argentfork give an ox to be roasted whole on the village
green when his son, the noble Viscount Silvercorrel, comes of age? Beef
makes boys. Beef nerves our navvies. The bowmen who won Cressy and
Agincourt were beef-fed, and had there been more and better beef in
the Crimea a year ago, our soldiers would have borne up better under
the horrors of a Chersonesean winter. We feast on beef at the great
Christian festival. A baron of beef at the same time is enthroned
in St. George’s Hall, in Windsor’s ancient castle, and is borne in
by lacqueys in scarlet and gold. Charles the Second knighted a loin
of beef; and I have a shrewd suspicion that the famous Sir Bevis of
Southampton was but an ardent admirer, and doughty knight-errant in
the cause of beef. And who does not know the tradition that even as
the first words of the new-born Gargantua were “A boyre, à boyre,”
signifying that he desired a draught of Burgundy wine--so the first
intelligible sounds that the infant Guy of Warwick ever spake were,
“Beef, beef!”
When the weary pilgrim reaches the beloved shores of England after a
long absence, what first does he remark--after the incivility of the
custom-house officers--but the great tankard of stout and the noble
round of cold beef in the coffee-room of the hotel? He does not cry “Io
Bacche! Evöe Bacche!” because beef is not Bacchus. He does not fall
down and kiss his native soil, because the hotel carpet is somewhat
dusty, and the action would be, besides, egregious; but he looks at the
beef, and his eyes filling with tears, a corresponding humidity takes
place in his mouth; he kisses the beef; he is so fond of it that he
could eat it all up; and he does ordinarily devour so much of it to his
breakfast, that the thoughtful waiter gazes at him, and murmurs to his
napkin, “This man is either a cannibal or a pilgrim grey who has not
seen Albion for many years.”
By beef I mean, emphatically, the legitimate, unsophisticated article.
Give me my beef, hot or cold, roast, boiled, or broiled; but away with
your beef-kickshaws, your beef-stews, your beef-haricoes, your corned
beef, your hung beef, and your spiced beef! I don’t think there is
anything so contemptible, fraudulent, adulterine in the whole world (of
cookery) as a beef sausage. I have heard that it is a favourite dish
with pickpockets at their raffle-suppers. I believe it. There was a boy
at school with me in the byegone--a day-boy--who used to bring a clammy
brownish powder, in a sandwich-box, with him for lunch. He called
it powdered beef; and he ate this mahogany, sawdust-looking mixture
between slices of stale bread and butter. He was an ill-conditioned
boy who had begun the world in the face-grinding sense much too early.
He lent halfpence at usury, and dealt in sock (which was our slang for
surreptitious sweet-stuff); and I remember with what savage pleasure
I fell upon and beat him in the course of a commercial transaction
involving a four-bladed penknife he had sold me, and which wouldn’t
cut--no, not even slate-pencil. But the penknife was nothing more than
a pretext: I beat him for his beef. He had the ring-worm, and it was
bruited about afterwards that he was of Jewish parentage. I believe,
when he began life, he turned out but badly.
I am reminded, however, that the subject of beef, as a British
institution, has already been treated at some length in this
journal.[A] I have merely ventured a few remarks on the bovine topic
generally, to preface the experiences I have to record of some recent
travels in search of beef I have made in the capital of France. One
might employ oneself better, perhaps, than in transcribing the results
of a week’s hankering after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and surely the
journey in search of bread is long and wearisome enough that we might
take beef as it comes, and thankfully. But, as I have said, beef is my
mission. I am a collector of bovine experiences, as some men collect
editions of Virgil, and some Raffaelle’s virgins, and some broadsides,
and some butterflies. And I know that there are moralities to be found
in beef as well as in the starry heavens and the vestiges of creation.
[A] See Volume x. page 113.
Let me first sum up all the knowledge I have acquired on the subject,
by stating my firm conviction that there is no beef in Paris,--I mean,
no beef fit to be eaten by a philobosopher. Some say that the French
cut their meat the wrong way; that they don’t hang it properly; that
they don’t hang it enough; that they beat it; that they overcook it.
But I have tasted infinite varieties of French beef; of the first,
second, and third categories. I have had it burnt to a cinder, and
I have had it very nearly raw. I have eaten it in private English
families resident in Paris, and dressed by English cooks. It is a
delusion: there is no beef in Lutetia.
The first beef I tried in my last campaign was the evening I dined
at His Lorship’s. Don’t be alarmed, my democratic friend. I am not
upon Lord Cowley’s visiting list, nor are any coronetted cards ever
left at my door on the sixth storey. I did not receive a card from
the British Embassy on the occasion of the last ball at the Hôtel de
Ville; and I am ashamed to confess that, so anxious was I to partake
of the hospitality of the Prefect of the Seine (the toilettes and
the iced punch are perfect at his balls), that I was mean enough to
foreswear temporarily my nationality and to avail myself of the card
of Colonel Waterton Privilege of Harshellopolis, Mass.:--said colonel
being at that time, and in all probability exceedingly sick, in his
stateroom of the United States steamer Forked Lightning, in the middle
of the Atlantic ocean. But, by His Lorship’s I mean an Anglo-French
restaurant--named after a defunct English city eating-house--situate
near the Place de la Concorde, and where I heard that real English
roast beef was to be obtained at all hours in first-rate condition.
Now, there is one thing that I do not like abroad; yea, two that are
utterly distasteful to me. The one thing is my countrymen’s hotels and
restaurants. These houses of refection I have usually found exceedingly
uncomfortable. So I was disposed to look somewhat coldly upon His
Lordship’s invitation, as printed upon placards, and stencilled on the
walls, till I was assured that his beef was really genuine, and that he
was an Englishman without guile.
His Lordship’s mansion I found unpretending, even to obscurity. There
was no porte-cochère, no courtyard, no gilt railings, nor green
verandahs. His Lordship’s hotel was, in fact, only a little slice of
a shop, with one dining-room over it; for which I was told he paid an
enormous rent--some thousands of francs a-year. In his window were
displayed certain English viands pleasant to the sight: a mighty
beef-steak pie just cut; the kidney end of a loin of veal, with real
English stuffing, palpable to sight; some sausages that might have
been pork, and of Epping; some potatoes in their homely brown jackets,
just out at elbows, as your well-done potatoes should be, with their
flannel under-garments peeping through; and a spherical mass, something
of the size and shape of a bombshell, dark in colour, speckled black
and white, and that my beating heart told me was a plum-pudding. A
prodigious Cheshire cheese, rugged as Helvellyn, craggy as Criffell,
filled up the background like a range of yellow mountains. At the base
there were dark forests of bottles branded with the names of Allsopp,
and Bass, and Guinness, and there were cheering announcements framed
and glazed, respecting Pale Ale on draught, L.L. whisky, and Genuine
Old Tom.[B] I rubbed my hands in glee. “Ha! ha!” I said internally.
“Nothing like our British aristocracy, after all. The true stock, sir!
May His Lordship’s shadow never diminish.”
[B] Our gallant allies have yet much to learn about our English
manners and customs. Only the other night, in the Foyer of the Grand
Opera, I saw (and you may see it there still if you are incredulous) a
tastefully enamelled placard, announcing that “genuine Old Tom” was to
be had at the Buffet. Imagine Sir Harcourt Courtley asking the Countess
of Swansdown, in the crush-room of Covent Garden Theatre, if she would
take half a quartern of gin!
His Lordship’s down-stairs’ apartment was somewhat inconveniently
crowded with English grooms and French palefreniers, and with an
incorrigible old Frenchman, with a pipe as strong as Samson, a
cap, cotton in his ears, and rings in the lobes thereof, who had
learnt nothing of English but the oaths, and was cursing some very
suspicious-looking meat (not my beef, I hope) most energetically.
I have an opinion that stables and the perfume thereof are pretty
nearly analogous the whole world over; so, at the invitation of a
parboiled-looking man in a shooting-jacket and a passion (who might
have been His Lordship himself for aught I knew), I went up-stairs.
There was an outer chamber, with benches covered with red cotton
velvet, and cracked marble tables, like an indifferent café; where some
bearded men were making a horrible rattle with their dominoes, and
smoking their abominable cigars (surely a course of French cigars is
enough to cure the most inveterate smoker of his love for the weed).
This somewhat discomposed me; but I was fain to push forward into the
next saloon where the tables were laid out for dining; and taking my
seat, to wait for beef.
There was myself and a black man, and his (white) wife, the Frenchman
with the spectacles, and the Frenchman with the bald head (I speak
of them generically, for you are sure to meet their fellows at every
public dining-table abroad), the poor old Frenchman with the wig, the
paralytic head and the shaking hands that trifle with the knives and
forks, as though they were red-hot. There were half-a-dozen other sons
of Gaul; who, with their beards, cache-nezs, and paletôts, all made to
pattern, might have been one another’s brothers; two ancient maiden
ladies, who looked like English governesses, who had passed, probably,
some five-and-thirty years in Paris, and had begun to speak a little
of the language; a rude young Englishman, who took care to make all
the company aware of the coarseness of his birthplace; an English
working engineer, long resident abroad, much travel-worn, and decidedly
oily, who had a voice like a crank, and might have been the identical
engineer that Mr. Albert Smith met on the Austrian Lloyd’s steamer; and
a large-headed little boy, with a round English jacket, who sat alone,
eating mournfully, and whom I could not help fancying to be some little
friendless scholar in a great French school, whose jour de sortie it
was, and who had come here to play at an English dinner. The days be
short to thee, little boy with the large head! May they fly quickly
till the welcome holidays, when thou wilt be forwarded, per rail and
boat, to the London Bridge station of the South Eastern Railway, to be
left till called for. I know from sad experience how very weary are the
strange land and the strange bed, the strange lessons and the strange
playmates, to thy small English heart!
A gaunt, ossified waiter, with blue black hair, jaws so closely shaven
that they gave him an unpleasant resemblance to the grand inquisitor of
the holy office in disguise seeking for heretics in a cook-shop, and
who was, besides, in a perpetual cold perspiration of anger against the
irate man in the shooting jacket below, and carried on fierce verbal
warfare with him down the staircase. This waiter rose up against me,
rather than addressed me, and charged me with a pike of bread, cutting
my ordinarily immense slice from it. I mildly suggested roast beef,
wincing, it must be owned, under the eye of the cadaverous waiter; who
looked as if he were accustomed to duplicity, and did not believe a
word that I was saying.
“Ah! rosbif!” he echoed, “bien saignant n’est ce pas?”
Now, so far from liking my meat “bien saignant” I cannot even abide the
sight of it rare, and I told him so. But he repeated “bien saignant,”
and vanished.
He came again, though; or rather his Jesuitical head protruded
itself over the top of the box where I sat (there were boxes at His
Lordship’s) and asked:
“Paint portare? p’lale? ole’ ale?”
I was nettled, and told him sharply that I would try the wine, if he
could recommend it. Whereupon there was silence, and then I heard a
voice crying down a pipe, “Paint portare!”
He brought me my dinner, and I didn’t like it. It was bien saignant,
but it wasn’t beef, and it swam in a dead sea of gravy that was not to
my taste; fat from strange animals seemed to have been grafted on to
the lean. I did not get on better with the potatoes, which were full
of promise, like a park hack, and unsatisfactory in the performance. I
tried some plum-pudding afterwards; but, if the proof of the pudding
be in the eating, that pudding remains unproved to this day; for, when
I tried to fix my fork in it, it rebounded away across the room, and
hit the black man on the leg. I would rather not say anything about
the porter, if you please; and perhaps it is well to be brief on the
subject of the glass of hot gin-and-water I tried afterwards, in a
despairing attempt to be convivial; for it smelt of the midnight-lamp
like an erudite book, and of the midnight oilcan, and had the flavour
of the commercial terebinthium, rather than of the odoriferous
Juniperus. I consoled myself with some Cheshire cheese, and asked the
waiter if he had the Presse.
“Ze Time is gage,” he answered.